Original half-sheet poster.


much younger if similarly emaci- ated actor who appears in TERROR BY NIGHT (1946) rather than in this film. At 29:53, Billings ap- pears onscreen again and Davies pounces back: “Skelton Knaggs again!” Elsewhere, he points out actor Harry Allen’s patently false British accent during his brief un- credited scene as the storekeeper Taylor, raising a valid ponder about why so many phony English ac- cents were deemed necessary in a story set, after all, in North America; alas, he chose the wrong actor to make his point, as Harry Allen’s IMDb page pegs him as a native of Sydney, Australia. Later still, during the voiceover that closes Miles Mander’s first scene as Judge Brisson, Davies offers “Again, we have the spooky voiceover that reinforces the idea of the omnipotence of the


murderer—a really clever touch”— and it’s evidently one missed on our commentator, as the voiceover is spoken by Rathbone’s Holmes, not the murderer. No remark is made about Ramson dressing in drag to slay the judge (was this a movie first?), any scene pho- tographed in the dark is in the style of “German expressionism,” and a climactic scene initially bal- lyhooed by Davies as one of the finest found in any Holmes film by any studio, ends with him apolo- gizing for it as “a corny mo- ment...” These missteps are unfortunate, because Davies is a winning speaker on the litera- ture and in his descriptions of the value of Rathbone and Bruce’s characterizations. But when he ventures outside that niche, his comments foster more confusion than clarity.


As THE PEARL OF DEATH be- gins, Sherlock Holmes is already on the case disguised as an old vicar, cleverly stealing the flaw- less Borgia Pearl back from its thieves—Giles Conover (Miles Mander) and Naomi Bates (Evelyn Ankers)—and returning it to London’s Royal Regent Mu- seum, where the £50,000 bauble is installed in a display case con- nected to a sensitive alarm sys- tem. Citing electricity as “the High Priest of false security” and urging the museum’s curator to take stronger protective mea- sures, Holmes proceeds to argue his point by effortlessly disabling the alarms, during which inter- val Conover, posing as a handy- man, absconds once again with the pearl—much to the dis- grace of Holmes and the jeers of Dennis Hoey’s fuddle-brained


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